mallorys_camera | Boring Domestic Backtrack

I had every intention of being a marshmallow while Nancy was visiting – she’s old, she has a good heart, she dotes on Robin, I’m Mother Teresa. Blah blah blah.

And actually we only got into it a couple of times.

For instance: when I wanted to do Griffin’s laundry.

Now, Nancy traveled with an entourage: her sister, Lucinda; Lucinda’s grandson, Griffin. Griffin is a stout blonde eight year old who’s smarter than anyone gives him credit for. In every large family, a kind of mythology grows up about its various members and the rap on Griffin is that he’s a loser, perpetually in the shadow of his brilliant older brother, Maxwell. Maxwell, as Nancy never tires of reminding us, is a competitor. A veritable sand devil on the basketball court. Knows more Scrabble words than the entire Random House Dictionary. Cleans his room!

Griffin was invited to travel with Grandma Nancy as a kind of reprieve on loserdom. “It should help his self-confidence,” Nancy would boom, most often with Griffin in earshot. “Now, of course, it’s difficult to be Maxwell’s younger brother. That boy is so amazingly gifted –“

Needless to say I have always disliked Maxwell heartily.

So on the next-to-the-last day of Griffin’s visit, I carted his suitcase out to the kitchen table where Nancy sat, bottomless cup of coffee at hand.

“What are you doing?” Nancy asked.

“I thought I’d do Griffin’s laundry!” I said brightly.

“Why would you insult Julie –“ Griffin’s mother – “ that way?”

“Huh?”

“Julie obviously packed enough clothes so Griffin would never run out of clothes while he was here. If you wash his clothes, Julie will worry that she didn’t pack enough. That’s an insult.”

I stared at her. Her eyes were flashing.

“It doesn’t have anything to do with the number of clothes, Nancy. It has to do with hygiene. Little boys don’t have any. How graphic would you like me to get? Work with me here, Nancy –“

“Julie uses bleach,” said Nancy. She didn’t exactly hiss but the meta-message was clear: I don’t see no Clorox in your laundry room, beeyitch.

This conversation continued for twenty minutes.

At the end of those twenty minutes, I dumped Griffin’s laundry into the washer. “What can I say, Nancy? I’m just a wild and crazy housewife.”

She glared.

One other difficult moment. It came very late at night, while I was chauffeuring the party back from Disneyland, navigating the car down over Pacheco Pass in a thick Tule fog with maybe two feet visibility.

I’m not a good driver. I grew up in Manhattan where the public transportation system is excellent, and like so many other of my NYC sensibilities, I carried this contempt for automobiles to the opposite side of the continent where it’s maladaptive. I learned to drive in my late twenties and it was one of the harder things I ever had to do, Fear Factor territory. So here I was in pitch blackness, my puny little headlights illuminating what looked like a gauze shroud, putt-putt-putting down a six degree grade and Nancy and Lucinda decide that this would be a good time to start discussing dead people. Dead people who dropped dead in their early fifties.

I’m fifty-two.

“Out of no where,” said Lucinda cozily. “One minute she was taking her grandkids to the mall. The next minute – pow. Right there in the parking lot, next to her car.”

“Thank God she wasn’t driving.”

“I know. Can you imagine? They’d all be gone.”

I had a sudden strong urge to drive right off the side of the cliff just to shut them the fuck up.

Instead I fumbled with the radio. Switched on KGO. Bernie Ward. The Left’s answer to Rush Limbaugh. Practically foaming at the mouth with his deconstruction of the vice presidential debates. Focus, focus, focus, I thought and let Dick Cheney’s villainy be the guiding light that pulled me down the mountain.